Welcome to the course

Welcome to this short course which explores the human abdomen. Your lead educator on the course is James Pickering, Associate Professor in Anatomy at the School of Medicine at the University of Leeds.

This course is just one of a series designed by the University of Leeds for school-based learners and their teachers. As this is an open course, we do also welcome other learners; as you will have seen from the welcome area, we have a diverse cohort signed up. However, it is important to recognise that this course, and the content and activities within it, has been specifically designed to help those studying at school or college make the transition to studying at university or the work place.

We have provided a course map to help you navigate your journey through the course: click on the image to access, or you can download the map from the Downloads section below.

It is anticipated that it will take around two hours to complete the tasks during this week. This includes watching videos, joining discussions, reading articles and completing any exercises. If you have more time, we have also provided some links to additional reading and resources.

In this first week you’ll learn to identify the positions of the organs within the abdomen, as well as becoming acquainted with common anatomical terminology used to talk about organs and structures and their position relative to each other. We’ll look at the anterior (front) abdominal wall and you’ll reflect on how the ‘abs’ are considered in relation to health and beauty.

In Week 2 you’ll look at the gastrointestinal tract (sometimes known as the GI tract or ‘food canal’) and how it’s made up. You’ll look at common problems that can occur in this tract and hear from an abdominal surgeon about the work he does to treat and cure such problems.

There’s plenty to keep you busy and interested, and we really hope you enjoy the course and the activities that we’ve planned.

Have your say:

Please use the comments to share your reasons for joining this course. Please also let us know where you are from; this course is open to learners world-wide.

Take some time to read the posts from other learners. If you come across someone with similar interests to you, you may choose to ‘follow’ them; you can then filter the discussions to only view the comments from those you are following. This can help to make discussions easier to manage.

Next steps

When you are ready to move on, click ‘Mark as complete’. You can monitor your progress through the course by selecting ‘Progress’ at the top of the page. This will show you the steps you have completed.